Living the rural good life, raising our very first livestock, learning to grown and raise our own food, and having grand adventures in the wilderness.

So. I have a confession. I’m a terrible goat mom, and in the two years I’ve owned goats, I have not once given them a copper bolus. Now, in my defense, my goats are pretty freaking healthy. Some of them are, however, starting to exhibit signs of very mild copper deficiency- mostly just a couple of fishtails here and there- officially making my intervention into their copper intake somewhat overdue.

When I first started with goats, I was completely overwhelmed by all the “extra” stuff that went along with goat ownership. You just put them out to pasture and they eat everything and get fat and that’s the end of it, right? Nope. While goats are relatively low maintenance, there are a few things they need, including free choice goat specific minerals and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and their twice yearly (sometimes more, sometimes less depending on your location and farm practices) copper bolus. Afraid of poisoning my goats, all this scared the crap out of me and I avoided it, until very recently.

On the recommendation of a friend, I enrolled in the free Copper Deficiency lecture by the Thrifty Homesteader (Deborah Niemann, author of Raising Goats Naturally). If you’re interested in demystifying minerals and copper and copper deficiency, click on the link above to enroll and access the brief but super informative class material.

Deborah’s lecture helped me to see there really isn’t anything to be afraid of, not even the copper boluses that I had been dreading. So I thought I’d pass the resource along, in case there is anyone else who, like me, has been avoiding this surprisingly straightforward part of goat keeping and husbandry.

Being the busy lady that I am, I missed Tasty Tuesday, which you didn’t even know about, because this was going to be the first week of Tasty Tuesday. So instead, this week, we’ll just have to make do with Tasty Thursday!

Zuppa Toscana (or as I like to call it, “Bomb Soup” – abbreviated from “That bomb soup you made that one time,”) is literally my favorite thing in the world to eat. The first time I had it, my mother made it, and it was incredible. It is a flavor explosion on your tongue. Sweet, salty, spicy, creamy, brothy, decadent, comforting… it’s everything you could ever want in a soup.

Traditionally made using mild sausage and spinach and not nearly so much heavy cream, I have adapted this recipe into a keto friendly, low carb dream. Paired with an italian salad, it will fill you up and send you off on a night long journey of peace and at-one-ness with the world.

Spring is spriiiiiiinging, folks! The time has come for the great spring farmstead effort to begin. For us, this means clearing all the piles of manure that are no longer frozen into rock solid heaps, organically fertilizing the pastures with llama beans and horse manure, harvesting rocks from, leveling and replanting last years pig pasture, cleaning up all the random messes we left last fall, and tilling and prepping the GARDEN!

It’s a lard load of work we’ve had going on for the last weeks and still have ahead of us, but it’s so absolutely amazing to get to be OUTSIDE again and back to the natural state of having dirt under my fingernails 100% of the time.

At the end of the growing season last year, we moved our meat hogs into the garden to finish out the plants and root around and till everything under. They made really great work of this task, and also helpfully located all the rocks that we didn’t manage to till out last year. Sighhhhh.

My Experience Hatching Chicken Eggs for the First Time

In February I made my very first chicken egg hatch. It actually went really well, considering how many things went wrong before I even got the eggs, and the fact that I was insanely uptight I was about it the entire time. Turns out, making life happen is a HUGE responsibility. Who knew?